This is useful information from Gary North, who often comes up with good stuff
on his website.

THE WORLD WE ARE LOSING

North's law of bureaucracy is as follows: "There is no government
regulation, no matter how plausible it initially appears, that will not
eventually be applied by some bureaucrat in a way that defies common
sense." For a regulation that makes considerable sense, it may take
months or even years for the right bureaucrat to come along. But not always.

Last Friday evening, my wife returned from a trip to California. On Saturday,
she began to unpack her bag. Not bags -- just one relatively small one. It
actually fits in an overhead bin. For the sake of this report, I'm glad that
she didn't do that with this bag. She noticed that the edge of the bag was
torn. I thought this might have been the work of the famous gorilla in the old
American Tourister luggage TV ad. But then she said, "the lock is
broken." I told her: "It's probably the new flight security rules
that went into effect on January 1. The inspectors broke the lock and got into
the bag."

She opened it. Sure enough, she found a slip of paper. I reprint it here.

To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transpiration Security
Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage. As
part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected. Your
bag was among those selected for physical inspection. During the inspection,
your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At
the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag,
which was resealed with a temper-evident seal. If the TSA screener was
unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the screener
may have been forced to break the locks on your bag. TSA sincerely regrets
having to do this, and has taken care to reseal your bag upon completion of
inspection. However, TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting
from this necessary security precaution.

As for the slash in the bag, who knows? The gorilla left no note
of explanation.You had better calculate this travel expense into the budgets
of your flights from now on.

Upstairs in the terminal gates, the security people make searches of
passengers. Searches are required to be random, for to go after some of Ann
Coulter's famous "swarthy men" would be to violate people's rights
on a racial basis, which is not allowed, rather than violating people's rights
on a non-racial basis, which is required by law. So, to maintain the illusion
of randomness in a world of surveillance cameras, government data bases, and
other profiling technologies, they have to conduct random searches.

During World War II, the British cracked the Germans' military code. The Brits
knew the times and routes of the oil tankers that were to supply Rommel's
forces in Africa. To keep the Germans from figuring out that their code had
been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane, which would make
itself visible to the men on the tankers, and then run for cover. The plane
would send a message announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The Germans on
the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from the air. What bad
luck! If they radioed home, they would tell the command that they had been
spotted. Then a British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never did
alter the code.

The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception. So are the random searches
of passengers and bags. They are to provide camouflage: (1) from voters who
demand action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise get their swarthy clients
released on the basis of racial profiling. Anyone who really expects searches
like these to protect airliners is so abysmally dense that he might as be a
Congressman. The other purposes of the new surveillance system relate more to
controlling average people than catching terrorists.